Your “What If” Argument is Invalid

Overnight, two young Australian men who made a really stupid choice 10 years ago were executed by firing squad on an island while their family were locked outside waiting to hear the gunshots ring out through the black evening.

There’s a mixed reaction on the media with the “they got what they deserved” and the group that I stand with that says “murdering two people who have been rehabilitated is not the answer”.

The thing that has made me ark up though is the argument of “what if they hadn’t have been caught; they’d still be doing it”, “what if the drugs had made it to the street; how many people would have died?”

Here’s the thing, the very biggest thing, the WHAT IF is invalid, because it didn’t happen.

They got caught, and if the officials in charge of the drug smuggling ring did what their laws deemed appropriate, the drugs would have been destroyed never to see a person’s vein or nostril. So let’s just sit in faith and trust that they were destroyed shall we, because you know, there would not be an element of corruption over there in any shape or form.

The speculation that is the WHAT IF, like people know what these two men would have decided had they made it through is invalid.

The fact is that everything conspired to get them before they left Indonesia, they were put into jail, and jail is meant to be a place to give people the opportunity to rehabilitate. They were taken out of a drug ring, their lives were spared way back then to give them a chance to see the error of their ways. They were young. Their brains hadn’t finished growing. How lucky for them that they were removed from a life that very rarely ends well for those involved.

They spent their next 10 years making good. A death sentence will do that to people.

Humanity would have seen that they did what everyone would have hoped they’d do. Rehabilitate. Do things to give back to let everyone know that they are sorry for being so dumb.

What’s their reward? Bullets into their chest and a dodgy casket with cheap tacky lace and a wooden cross with stencilled lettering.